What To Do When Someone Steals Your Content – SEO Monday

You’ve poured hard work, time and effort into your content. Do you know if someone is copying your content? There are a few ways to find out.

Copy and paste a portion of a paragraph on a page on your site into the Google search bar. It can be the home page, category or product page. If another page on the web has the same content, you’ll see the copied content in the “description” portion, which is right underneath the title, in Google’s search results.

Since the first option is a manual process and can be very time consuming, www.copyscape.com can provide you with alerts when a piece of content has been copied from your site on another website for a nominal fee.

How to use duplicated content to your advantage

Step 1: Contact the Owner of the Website

-User “contact us” link or webmaster email address

-If you are unable to find an email address to contact the site owner, you can use a tool to look up webmaster contact information here: http://whois.domaintools.com/

-If the site’s contact information is protected, you can use the hosting information provided on the domaintools.com WhoIs tool.

Step 2: Removing the Copied Page

Once you’ve made a request of the webmaster to take down the content in question, they should either delete the content or take the page down. The appropriate steps are:

For the webmaster to block the page from the search engines by disallowing crawling and indexing in the robots.txt file – using the following code: User-agent: *Disallow: /blocked-page/

Or by using a noindex meta tag (which looks like the example in bold): <html><head><title>blocked page</title><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”></head>

If the webmaster completed one of the preceding actions, you may request the page to be removed here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1

If a user were to click on the page that was taken down, a 404 (not found) or 410 status code should be returned.

For extreme cases, such as a site violating your legal rights, which you’re unable to work with the webmaster to change or remove information, you may fill out this form: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=legal_removals

It is really important that you understand the following: Google indexes and ranks pages based on content and other external factors, such as the inbound links to the URL. Because of this, it is a possibility for a URL to continue to appear in search results for content that no longer exists on the page, even after the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed.

Although no one wants to deal with plagiarizers, there are instances where you can turn the situation into a positive one. If a blogger is using your content and their site has some value to it, contact the owner and suggest that you could provide them with some content to replace the copied content and ask them to provide a link back to your website as a link building opportunity.

If you have copied content from a manufacturer for your product descriptions, you’re hurting the chances of your product pages being found in Google’s search results. It’s worth the investment to have unique copy written for your site!

Unique copy is vital to your online visibility! Ensure that others are not taking the copy you’ve worked hard for. Make sure that you’re continually working on fresh, unique content for all of your webpages for a stronger website.

Need help with content? Exclusive Concepts offers copywriting as a service to its clients. Call 800-504-4324 for a free audit!